This invention is related generally to the field of medical product inventory and control, and more particularly to a method of and system for attaching externally powered transponders to medical products for identifying, inventorying, and locating medical products, such as pills, surgical sponges, surgical instruments, and the like.
There is a need to identify, locate, and control medical products, such as medication, surgical sponges and instruments, and other items. The need stems from patient safety and health care provider liability concerns as well as from cost concerns.
There are numerous problems with the current systems used to identify medications. Almost all methods of medication identification rely on various combinations of distinctive shapes, sizes, colors, and in some cases an alphanumerical coding system for the type and strength of medication. First, many drugs lack sufficiently distinctive markings. Printed markings are often difficult to read. There is no simple method for identifying the manufacturer of a given pill, yet most of the handbooks and catalogues require identification of the manufacturer before identification of the pill can occur. Information regarding lot number, date of manufacture, and expiration date is lost when the medication is repackaged by a pharmacy and dispensed as a prescription for the patient.
The lack of a simple system for positive identification of medications on a single dose basis leads to a very complex and costly system for dispensing medications. Automated pharmacy systems exist, but verification of which medication is dispensed remains largely a manual process. Pharmacies and nurses continue to have error rates that lead to minor and sometimes major complications for patients. The lack of positive identification for medications also leads to xe2x80x9ccopycatxe2x80x9d medicines that look like those of a large pharmaceutical firm, but which may be inferior in quality with respect to both content and bioavailability.
Even greater problems are encountered when the patients receive their prescriptions and assume control of their medicines. Often, patients are unaware of which medications they are taking. This problem is compounded when the patient receives a large number of medications, as if often the case, especially with elderly patients. To facilitate dosing, patients place their pills in smaller containers that provide the day""s medications in divided doses. Millions of dollars are spent annually having trained nurses help patients with this type of dosing. Once pills are removed from their original prescription containers, it becomes very difficult to re-sort the pills without introducing errors.
Finally, patients may not know what medicines they may have taken or in what quantity. Large amounts of nurse and physician time are expended trying to determine which medicine the patient is taking. The situation can be impossible when there are multiple manufacturers and multiple doses of the same medication.
Patients are often brought to treatment facilities without medication records and in conditions that prevent their providing an accurate medication history. Medication side effects or overdoses are often important contributors of the patient""s conditions. Even when the family or nursing home staff brings the usual xe2x80x9cbagxe2x80x9d or list of medicines, it""s not easy to determine what the patient actually took and when. Some medications may require specific xe2x80x9cantidotesxe2x80x9d while others require avoidance of conflicting medications. The inability of the physician to know for certain what medication(s) the patient may have taken leads to increased risks for the patient as well as increased healthcare costs for society.
Finally, there is no simple way to determine whether the medication has entered the gastrointestinal track appropriately and whether it has dissolved. Problems with swallowing may cause medications to stick in the esophagus of the patient. Certain types of foods and medications have a major impact on dissolution of medications once the patient takes them. Therefore, there is no simple and reliable method of determining whether pills taken by the patient have dissolved or not.
In addition to problems surrounding the identification of medications, sponges and instruments are on occasions inadvertently left inside the body. X-rays are often taken looking for these instruments and sponges, leading to increased operating room and anesthetic time and increased radiation to the patient and health care personnel. This can lead to pain and suffering, repeat surgery on part of the patient, and a lawsuit for the doctor and hospital. All medical items in the operating room are counted before opening the body and just before closing the body. On occasion the count is wrong mostly because of miscounting, or the instruments or other medical items having been inadvertently misplaced or discarded rather than having been left in the body. The current method of counting and finding items missing in the count prior to the closing of the patient""s incision is time consuming, which means longer anesthetic time for the patient and larger hospitalization costs.
After surgery is finished in the operating room, or after procedures anywhere in the hospital or doctor""s office, valuable instruments and nondisposable items are sometimes inadvertently discarded. One does not currently know the content of the trash bag without sorting through the bag, which can be not only time consuming but unsanitary and dangerous. Prior art inventory systems do not allow for the identifying material to be biocompatible or enter the body.
Some inventory systems have used identifying tags, which are secured to various items to be inventoried. These type systems typically use tags which include external identifying markings which may be read by a scanning device. Such inventory systems require that identifying tags be secured to each of various medical products for reading by the scanning device.
The present invention disclosed and claimed herein, in one aspect thereof, comprises a method of attaching one or more transponders to medical and non-medical products to tag units of the products with identifying data contained in a memory of the transponders. The one or more transponders each include a memory containing the corresponding identifying data which is emitted by the respective transponder in response to an electromagnetic signal emitted externally of the transponder. The identifying data corresponds to at least one of the respective one or more transponders and a respective product for tagging. The one or more transponders are attached to respective ones of the products to tag the products with the corresponding identifying data. The methods of attaching include at least one from the group of inserting, implanting, tissue glueing, epoxy glueing, laminating, sewing, hot pressing, shrink wrapping, vacuum wrapping, soldering, encasing in plastic, rolling into, molding, strapping, stamping, retrofitting, embossing, hooking, attaching by VELCRO(trademark) or the like, intertwining clusters of balls, attaching by TEFLON(trademark), meshing, emulsifying, suspending, floating or mixing in liquids, gases, slurries and the like, swaging, electrostatic bonding, embedding by polymer polymerization, embedding by pulse plasma polymerization, encased within a liposome for oral, intravenous, transdermal, subcutaneous or other means of delivery, contained integrally within the structure of a microspherical semiconductor serving other purposes, for example, a drug delivery reservoir, biosensor, temperature sensor and the like, and entrapping the transponder segments with an attachment layer.